


Dead Men In My Tent

by plumedy



Category: Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
Genre: Alternate Ending, Drama, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-18
Updated: 2012-11-18
Packaged: 2017-11-18 23:45:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/566660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plumedy/pseuds/plumedy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Now there's a whole cemetery in Yossarian's tent. Not that he has anything against cemeteries, but he'd rather have them outside.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dead Men In My Tent

This time Fate crushed him with a heavy set of ribs. The fatal thorax belonged to Colonel Cathcart, who was walking along the corridor just when Nately’s whore failed to knife Yossarian for the last time. Colonel Cathcart wanted to have her arrested, but he couldn’t quite succeed in doing anything about it, because just a moment later somebody bumped into his chest like a cannonball.

“Ooh,” gasped the Colonel, and grabbed the man instinctively. He met with desperate and violent resistance – the escapee was biting him, wriggling, beating every vulnerable part of the Colonel's body with his heavy tanned fists, so that the pain seemed to be attacking from all directions at once. The Colonel didn’t like his vulnerable parts being beaten, and so he tightened his grip and pushed the man against the wall.

It was Yossarian.

Cathcart blinked, then blinked once more. He felt the deadly rumbling starting in his head, and it was gradually and inexorably transforming into the sound of this hateful snakish name that was chasing him everywhere. Yossarian! was once again the cause of his trouble, and the Colonel most certainly wasn’t going to let it continue that way.

“Just where exactly you think you’re going, Yo-Yo?” inquired he crabbly, holding the fugitive in a steely grip.

“To the toilet,” Yossarian answered as innocently as he could, mastering a vulgar grin.

“But it’s in the other direction.”

“So I confused them, what’s of it?”

“Why, nothing,” said the Colonel very peacefully, relaxing. Yossarian relaxed in his arms, too, and offered a half-hearted smile.

In the next moment his head was crushed against the wall with violent force, and the exasperated, exhausted face with livid bags under the eyeholes was flying wildly over him like some image of the Horseman of Apocalypse.

“More missions or a court-martial?” roared and echoed the mighty voice. Yossarian’s head split. Everything was darkening around him, and he felt tears of pain streaming down his face.

“Danby!” he cried, and his head split once again. “Help me! Help me, you son of a bitch!”

“More missions or a court-martial?!” thundered the storm, and rain beat in his face.

“Missions,” wept Yossarian helplessly. His wound opened, and blood was gushing from it all over the floor, painting the harsh sunlight sickening orange. This was the shade of Milo’s tangerines, only with a little bit of artificial coloring added.

Then everything was red. It should’ve been black, but it was red. Even there it wasn’t what it was supposed to be.

Through the pain Yossarian felt bitter disappointment in life and wondered briefly if Major Danby saw darkness when he was losing consciousness. Then it occurred to him that fainting probably wasn't something that was supposed to happen to majors.  
If he, Yossarian, were a colonel, Yossarian decided, he would issue a decree for Danby to faint just to see if for him everything would be truly dark.

And then everything was truly dark.

It was raining in Pianosa. Now, however, under General Sheisskopf, the rain wasn’t such a pure blessing as it used to be in Dreedle’s days. Sheisskopf loved rain; it allowed him to practice his new waterproof methods of parading. He ordered General Peckem to provide all the men in the squadron with spiked boots so that they wouldn’t slip in the mud, and with wooden gags so that they wouldn’t cough.

There was a silver lining to this cloud: Sheisskopf didn’t allow Cathcart to raise the number of missions anymore. Not yet, he said. It was interfering with the squadron's marching activities. Cathcart was crushed. He couldn’t possibly request a reserve; he therefore couldn’t volunteer his group for any missions that might get him into The Saturday Evening Post. He couldn’t even order Sergeant Whitcomb to write more letters, as without missions there would be no casualties. Any other man in his place would've surely drowned his sorrows in alcohol, but Colonel Cathcart was no such man. Instead he joined in a conspiracy with Colonel Korn and ex-Sergeant Wintergreen in order to scheme against Sheisskopf and Twenty-Seventh Air Force in general.

However, the newly-made General Sheisskopf also didn’t allow the men who would complete all the required missions to return back to the States, since it would interfere with the squadron's marching activities, too. Hanging around Pianosa and taking part in parades was, of course, better than flying missions, but it wasn’t a good kind of pastime. The absurd finally ripened and now started to rot. Only nobody smelt the stink, probably due to the fact that Milo stopped buying plum tomatoes from Colonel Cathcart and every remaining tomato now rotted in the mess hall and was spreading fetid smell all over the island.

So there they were, marching along the muddy parade ground with their mouths plugged tightly with oaken gags of best quality that Milo flew there from Brazil. Even Doc Daneeka was forced to march, in spite of the fact that he was dead. His little hunched figure in a white surgical coat looked tragicomic.

He walked to Yossarian’s side after the parade and, coughing violently and complaining at the same time, said that he wanted to move into Yossarian’s tent.

“But you have a tent of your own,” answered Yossarian, astonished.

“There’s a dead man there.”

“He can’t be. These four bastards have just thrown him away into the bushes.”

“Not that dead man!” interrupted Daneeka with irritation, “I mean Chief White Halfoat! He’s an Indian, he’s going to haunt my tent after his death.”

Yossarian was stunned.

“For how long?” he asked dumbly.

“How am I supposed to know that?” was a doleful answer. “Probably forever.”

“But what are we to do with those four from my tent?”

“I will offer them mine,” and for a moment Daneeka’s melancholic sick face lit with a sinister smile.

They went to Yossarian’s roommates and offered them an empty tent. The boys were a bit reluctant to leave their good friend Yo-Yo, but he shoved all the photos of their girlfriends into their hands and almost forced them out.

Sergeant Towser didn’t mind. After all, he already had one dead man at Yossarian's place; why not add another one?

“Want to set up a cemetery, eh?” he said and made a conspiratorial clank with his teeth, which weirded Yossarian out immensely.

 

That evening they sat near Orr’s stove, Doc Daneeka wrapped up in all his warm things and all Yossarian’s warm things and spread on the chair like some awful jellyfish.

“You don’t mind me, do you?” inquired he very suddenly in a pitiful voice.

Yossarian stared at him for a moment.

“Why should I?”

“I’m dead,” answered Doc Daneeka awkwardly. “It seems to me that you’ve had enough trouble with dead men for a lifetime.”

“Well, in this case you hardly make a difference,” Yossarian gave a bitter laugh. “There’s indeed one hell of the dead here, you know. Snowden is here, and Kid Sampson, and McWatt, and Kraft, and all the aunties and uncles and shopkeepers.”

“There must be really little room for you here then.”

“It is.”

“At least Orr escaped.”

Yossarian’s face lightened slightly.

“Yes, at least Orr escaped.”

They both looked at Orr’s stove, and Doc Daneeka sniffed, drowning further in the intimidating mess of warm clothes.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t ground you,” he said.

“It’s fine.”

It wasn’t fine, but Yossarian remembered all the Doc’s complaints about the Pacific, and his permanent state of being afraid, and Chief White Halfoat, and the day of Snowden’s death, and Milo’s bombardment; and he felt compassion and the urge to console this small, self-pitying dead physician.

“You’re not dead, Doc, you know,” Yossarian said resolutely.

“I’m not?” there was hopeful surprise in Daneeka’s voice.

“No. And that’s good. Let it stay the way it is.”


End file.
